Trial Ordered Over Threats Against Actor

In a bedroom of a house in Camarillo, amid hundreds of videotapes of a television comedy called “Family Ties,” and thousands of photos of its star, Michael J. Fox, she sat at a Sharp typewriter and wrote letters, prosecutors say.

In a year’s time, prosecutors allege, she mailed nearly 6,000 of them. In June of 1988, 355 letters. In July, 816. Last January, 733. All addressed to Michael J. Fox.

The letters landed in the mail room at Paramount Studios, at a post office box in Studio City, at Fox’s public relations firm. In capital letters and rows of exclamation marks, they enunciated much the same theme: Michael, I will kill you. I will kill your wife if you don’t divorce her. I will kill your unborn baby.

Twice, there were no letters--just boxes of rabbit droppings.

‘Liked’ Fox

On Wednesday, Tina Marie Ledbetter, a 26-year-old shipping clerk who kept rabbits in the garage, was ordered to stand trial on five counts of making terrorist threats to the actor, someone she allegedly told an investigator she “liked,” and “wanted to get his attention.”

In court, at last, she had it. Tina Ledbetter, who had apparently never been any closer to Fox than seated invisibly in a studio audience during a taping of “Family Ties,” was less than a dozen feet from him.

He was on the witness stand, and she--a pale woman in a blue jail-issue jacket and green cotton dress--sat at a table, taking notes and only rarely glancing at him.

No, said Fox, in a half-hour of testimony, he had never seen her before. But yes, he said, he “absolutely” took the threats seriously, after hearing about them from his secretary and seeing some letters for himself. “I believe someone intended to hurt my wife and myself and our child.”

Fox co-wrote a whimsical piece in the current issue of “Esquire” about his cloak-and-dagger efforts to evade the tabloid press at his wedding last year, but it was clear Wednesday that there were grimmer underlying concerns.

‘Quite Distraught’

In April, 1988, his then-fiancee, co-star Tracy Pollan, phoned him in Thailand “in the middle of the night . . . crying” and “quite distraught” about the letters, Fox testified.

“Primarily I was concerned for Tracy’s safety, but also I was concerned for myself as well.” The threats “changed my life style extensively.” He hired a security agency, got extra security on the set. Pollan traveled under a false name, he said.

If Ledbetter was not staring at the 27-year-old Emmy-winning actor, almost everyone else on the crowded courtroom benches was--along with others who had to be content to peek in the courtroom windows.

Fox sighed as he flipped through five loose-leaf notebooks of letters, a fraction of the total, each containing photocopies of the same missive, often dozens a day.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Gruber noted that they charted a yearlong crescendo of venom, from telling Fox to return to his old girlfriend to letters outraged at his marriage and then furious that Pollan was pregnant. They “became a lot more specific . . . a lot more angry and more threatening,” Fox said.

‘Divorce Tracy’

“You are a total (expletive) for marrying Tracy!” one letter went. Then, “Divorce Tracy or you are dead! I am coming after you with a gun and I am going to kill you if you don’t divorce Tracy immediately!” And after she was pregnant, “I’m going to kill you and that (expletives) bitch and that (expletives) baby!”

“It got very frightening,” Fox acknowledged. Afterward, Fox left as he had come: through the judges’ private corridor, in the company of two bodyguards.

Investigators had traced the parcels of rabbit feces, and district attorney’s investigator Gary Schram arrested Ledbetter in February, at her office in Westlake Village. She “did admit she wrote the letters to Mr. Fox,” Schram testified Wednesday.

Inside her house were thousands more letters, Schram said. Postage for what she had already sent cost at least $1,500. “She indicated she wanted to get (Fox’s) attention as her reason for sending the letters.”

She said “that she hated (Pollan). She said she’d been becoming more angry week by week, month by month . . .,” Schram testified. “She did think about getting a gun and shooting Tracy but never actually thought out how to do it.”

Municipal Judge Rand Schrader ordered her held for trial without bail. Gruber agreed that Ledbetter’s entering a psychiatric facility as a condition of bail is “certainly a viable alternative.” Ledbetter, who has never been arrested before, is in the psychiatric unit at the Sybil Brand Institute for Women.

Defense attorney Mitchell Young called it a “difficult” case, one of the first under a new law primarily drawn to stop gang intimidation of witnesses. The law allows prosecution of anyone who makes a verbal threat of death or great bodily injury, regardless of any intent to carry it out. Before, the law required prosecutors to prove intent. No weapon was found.